The Civilizing Regression

The Civilizing Regression

Regarding the Mud of the Primary, the Driven, and the Primitive.

Notes from the Ground

Dr. Lenin Torres Antonio

We have been inundated with images of the Jewish Holocaust as the greatest genocidal suffering humanity has ever experienced, and Hitler as the personification of evil on earth; Buried in that story lie the thousands of human beings killed in the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, in addition to the dead from the military coups in Latin America and the Caribbean in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, financed, organized, and promoted by US intelligence agencies. This does not include the dead from the wars provoked by neocolonial Europe in Africa, as well as those recently caused by the Israeli aggression against Iran's sovereignty, and even the million young Ukrainians killed and thousands of other young Russians killed to date in the war in Ukraine, also caused by the interference of the US and its acolytes of death, England, France, and Israel, in their fight against Russia and China for global dominance. This is how the Western narrative has operated, skewing history and creating a world tailored to maintain the system of exploitation and subjugation. At the head of the global gang of white-collar criminals is the United States and its ruling class, on one side are its henchmen, the thuggish leader's henchmen, his European henchmen, England and France, and Israel from the Middle East.

If we view the 20th century as the time of the fall of ideologies with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 21st century is the time of the death of reason and civility.

A quarter of the way into the 21st century, the greatest genocide against the Palestinian people in the supposedly most "enlightened and civilized" era is occurring, as is the persecution and deportation of Latino immigrants in the United States, the United States being the supposed melting pot of immigration. So, to keep us alienated, they have used the media to defend "poor Ukraine" from the brutal Russian Bear, without informing us that this war occurred because of the unconditional support that the Nazi Zelensky felt and has from NATO. Now, the Western media, bent on trying to hide the truth about the Zionist state of Israel's aggression against Iran, insisting on defending the "suffering Jewish people" from the missiles of Iranian "Islamic extremists." To top it all off, we see how the great organizations that represented diplomacy, agreement, and the defense of human rights—the UN and the International Criminal Court, among other supranational bodies—lie petrified, like great museum pieces commemorating the age of enlightened reason, now ineffective and obsolete.

The process of erasing any semblance of a Palestinian state has claimed more than 50,000 Palestinian lives, and more than 35,000 are children. Netanyahu paradoxically emerges as the Zionist Hitler, perpetrating the "Final Solution" for the Palestinian people, with the complicity of the US and its allies. Undeterred, he vociferates that there will be no place for a Palestinian state, that he will turn Gaza into a golf course and destroy the Persian nation from its foundations.

In the US, images of the violent arrests of those who dared to protest the illegal deportations of Latin American immigrants, primarily Mexicans, by security forces and the US National Guard are reminiscent of the arrests and persecution of Jewish immigrants and citizens in Europe during World War II, primarily in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, among other European countries, by Hitler's SS. Not a comma or a period makes a difference. The Trump administration acts without the slightest regard for the law, much less for human rights and individual freedoms. With the force of the military state, it orders the most violent action against the insurrectionists, stupidly thinking that by criminalizing and accusing immigrants of the degradation and decadence of the Empire, it naively believes that with these brutal, inhuman acts it will restore "the greatness of the United States." Every day we see how it sinks into the mire of primal, impulsive, and primitive forces, and with it, it drags the world to a level of degradation we have never witnessed before.

So there is an "other final solution" taking place, which has cost more lives than World War II, against the poor and dispossessed, in addition to wars and interventionism, through the unjust appropriation of the wealth produced by this world by the neoliberal economic model in a few countries, and in each country in a few privileged families. Nietzsche's voice resurfaces everywhere. It is the rebellion of the ascetics, those who went from "bad" to "good," aristocrats, "the best" of the human species, in the translation they tried to pin on Hitler, who were Hitler's true heirs. This "other final solution" without concentration camps, because the same countries within the economic spectrum are becoming prisons of exclusion and progressive death by starvation. The Jewish scholar Sigmund Freud tells us that human beings are governed by the pleasure principle, the reality principle, and the death drive. This description in modern times reveals true human nature. Far from the joyful phrases of Aristotle, Rousseau, or Kant, we see that human beings are rational beings who, when civilized, live in community, seeking the well-being of one another, for the death drive and selfish desires are the supreme characteristic of human beings. In his work, Totem and Taboo, Freud raises some revealing questions: How primitive are we civilized people? Or, how civilized are primitive people? In modern times, it seems the answer is that civilized man is more primitive than those he calls "savages" or "indigenous people." He is governed by violent and selfish impulses, perversely concealing a sophisticated framework they have called "civilization," which is achieved through the constant satisfaction of his most primal appetites, his morbid desire prone to perversity, his pernicious desire to subjugate others, and his desire for death, which makes them both deadly enemies.

The world of fiction, made of laws, norms, codes, manners, and even civilizing letters, is left behind, as a new form of writing resurfaces: the purgatory of Dante's Divine Comedy by Alighieri, and the hellish internal struggle of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment by the Russian genius Dostoevsky, among other texts that allude to violence and the poor spiritual life of modern man.

My beloved Mexico, where private interests are more powerful than the common good, we see at this moment our fellow citizens suffer the affront of a descendant of a German immigrant converted to Islamic fundamentalism, Donald Trump, unleashing his furious Praetorian Guard against immigrants to expel them from "paradise," and a political opposition discrediting President Sheinbaum's call to stop these fascist raids in the supposed heart of civility, the United States, which emulates more the Praetorian South Africa that the illustrious Nelson Mandela lived through and Hitler's Germany than the civilized world. A call to stop the violence and respect the human rights of Mexicans in the United States.

What's missing? Let the civilized world, if there is such a world, raise the weapons of reason and clemency and stop the civilized regression and cleanse the filth of the political class that is destroying the world.

Now, let's march together against war and violence, against the selfish appetites that rule the world, against the madness we are experiencing in the war in Ukraine, and let's send those guilty of this savage mutiny of "emptyheads" to the firing squad, even if they are leaders of noble countries and supposedly established democracies.

The world is experiencing its worst moment, for we know that if a nuclear war breaks out, there will be no winners. We must stop the insane spiral of non-ideological confrontations, the dominance of the pure power of weapons, the subordination or annihilation of others. There is no other time. We are in danger of a real death—this one is not symbolic or imaginary—that can literally leave us speechless, silent, at peace (rest in peace).

Rest in peace, our so-called civilization.

June 2025